And several minutes later, Sable plates up a bunch of stir-fry chicken and noodles, with a tasty sauce and not a crunchy veggie in sight.

"Dinnertime, darlings. What would you like to drink?"

Audrey flips her phone over to TTS mode so she doesn't have to hold it where Sable can see, and taps out a message before laying it on the table. 

The slightly uncanny female voice announces: "Let's go with juice for now? Or I could have water. I used to drink colas, but twenty year old me has told me that the artificial sweeteners in them attack your gut microbiome, so I think for this go around I would like to not start." 

"Juice it is."

Audrey gets a glass of juice, Sable gets a glass of water, and she sits down across from her foster-daughter to eat.

"Enjoy."

And she eats! She actually really likes trying new foods when she's reasonably likely to like them, and this one seems to be working just fine for her!

She in fact is mostly focusing on stuffing her face, and making little happy noises when she discovers new flavours in the mix.

Producing happy nomtime noises in one's foster-daughter turns out to be a very rewarding experience.

Sable enjoys her own meal as well, making a few happy noises of her own.

"So," she begins, when she takes a pause between bites, "presumably we want a word processor, some art software, and what sort of games do you like?"

Nod nod! And a flashed PUZZLE, followed by a few moments' thought, followed by EXPLORATION, SURVIVAL. SOMETIMES GOOD PLATFORMERS. DO YOU HAVE BLOCKSCAPE HERE?

"Hmm. There are definitely some things in those genres we can get you. Don't have anything called Blockscape here. What's it about?"

VIRTUAL 3D MODEL KIT. EVERYTHING IS BLOCKS FOR EASY BUILDING. DIFFERENT KINDS OF BLOCKS DO DIFFERENT THINGS. YOU HAVE TO GET THE BLOCKS FROM THE ENVIRONMENT. THERE ARE ALSO NPC GIRLS TO DATE AND CUDDLEMON TO HELP YOU WITH AUTOMATION. YOU HAVE TO GET YOUR GIRLFRIENDS AND CUDDLEMON SHELTER, GOOD FOOD, CLEAN WATER, AND NICE LUXURIES BY EXPLORING, BUILDING AND LEARNING INDUSTRIAL OR KITCHEN PROCESSES. LIKE A CITY BUILDER BUT MORE PERSONAL SCALE. YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO PLAY IT IN GROUPS BUT IT HAS A SINGLE PLAYER MODE FOR SHY PEOPLE LIKE ME. 

"Wow! That sounds like an awesome game. I'd love to play it. We don't have anything quite like that, unfortunately. Mixing survival with Pokémon — what we call your world's Cuddlemon, I think — would be amazing already, and mixing dating elements would be quite a fun touch too. But survival is a bit of an under-explored genre so far here, as is industrial build-up. We have city-builders, but nothing that uses any kind of resource awareness at a personal scale like that. At least not that I'm aware of."

Audrey exhales and turns on TTS mode, mostly because she's getting tired of block capitals for all her messages. 

Tippity tappity type...

"Blockscape is the most popular game of all time on Terra," the feminine voice announces, "and it is not close. Somewhere around one in every twenty people on the planet own a copy. Practically anyone who has ever played video games owns a copy. It has a robust modding workshop and the most influential mods often become part of the core game, sometimes with small edits to make them thematically cohesive. That's how most of the most popular girlfriends and cuddlemon were added: crowdsourcing. Combat mods are popular as well. My twenty year old self informs me there are also several officially supported adult mods, though the stylistic blockiness of the game makes it a little less common than, for instance, cuddlemon combat or contest mods. Some mods attempt to fix this with a stylized talk interface that displays higher-resolution pixel art."

She exhales and taps out a smaller message.

"Even talking with TTS is getting a little tiring now though. I think we know what we need for the computer, and what we don't will be benefited by my doing research on the internet. Do you have a global Archive site for factual information?"

Sable nods. "Wikipedia is a public, crowdsourced encyclopedia. I'll get everything set up for you, including a bookmark in your browser for Wikipedia. After we finish eating, would you rather read alone, read and sit together while I set up your computer, or watch something together while I set up your computer? Whatever you like is fine, sweetheart."

Tippity tappity tap. 

"I'll go upstairs and read I think. Let me know when the laptop is ready and I will try and text you using it."

She nods and smiles. "Have a good and restful time reading, sweetheart. Let me know if you need anything."

She finishes up the last few bites of her meal.

Audrey goes back to her meal, now that she's not typing away, and finishes up a few minutes later. 

"Thank you." Says the TTS in its monotone, and Audrey scowls and takes a breath and squeaks out a small "Thanks" of her own, putting warmth into her voice. The effort seems to drain her; she shrinks a little after that, and goes off with her book in hand to get some time alone, not acknowledging any reply Sable makes. 

And Sable, in turn, goes to set up the computer. First, uninstall the bloatware that comes with every Windows computer to ever ship, like the pre-installed anti-virus and trials of various things. Then install actually good anti-virus. Then install Firefox, and an ad-blocker. OpenOffice, then Paint.NET, Inkscape, GIMP, and if she winds up wanting more powerful art software she'll worry about buying Adobe's crap then.

Bookmarks for Wikipedia and Youtube, then install email and XMPP clients, make a songbird@ address on her servers for both.

Hmm. Games. Most of the best platformers and exploration games are console titles. Well, there's Myst, for puzzle games, and she can bookmark a few lists of some of the best games in various genres. And they can talk about consoles.

She adds herself as a contact in the email and chat clients.

A few other various setup things, and then... she's done.

Okay, close it up and head upstairs with it and the lapdesk, and knock on the Songbirds' door.

"Laptop's done, sweetie."

Audrey opens the door moments later, a wide smile on her face; she's wearing one of her new skirts, a longer black number with sunflowers on it, and the nice blouse Lily picked out for her. 

"Hi hi!", she says with a warm smile. "Feeling a little better after some time alone. So that's the machine?"

She sizes it up — it looks a little chunkier than the machines she's used to from her world, especially in the battery department, but it is a laptop and it is hers and it is such a relief to know she'll still have access to a whole Network of communications devices even once her phone dies in a week. Even if it is aliens. Honestly, kind of especially if it's aliens. 

"Thank you so much," she says with a warm smile, and extends her arms to carefully take it. "Did you get the lap desk too while you were out or?" 

Sable's other hand swings up after handing off the laptop, revealing a purple lap desk. "Yep!" she replies with a grin. "I've set you up with an email client and chat client, username songbird, password saved in the system, added myself as a contact for both. They're both right on the desktop, and I can show 'em to you. Either will ping my phone, the chat client immediately and the email after a few minutes."

Audrey bounces on her toes, then goes and sets the laptop on the bed, then puts the purple lap desk on her lap and puts the laptop on it in turn and boots it. 

"Alright," she says. "I'll just set up a password for my account real quickly..." 

She pokes at the main menu a little, scratches her head a bit, then goes to wikipedia and searches for "windows customization settings". She gets a link to the Control Panel article; from there she looks for said setting in the start menu of her new laptop and finds it, opening the personalization settings. Searching the archive again, she enters in "pictures of sunflowers" and frowns when she gets mostly links to movie studios. Searching for simply "Sunflowers" gets her an article on them, but it only has pictures intended for identification and explanation, nothing that speaks to her sense of aesthetics at all. 

"I think I might be using this archive wrong," Audrey says after scratching her head a moment. "Is there some separate sub-archive for art or similar?" 

"Oh. We don't have that kind of multipurpose archive. That's a little too sensible for Earth. Wikipedia mostly just has facts and history type things. Instead we have search engines that index everything on every website they can find. Currently the best one of those is called Google. Mind if I pull it up for you, and show you how to bookmark it?"

"Please!" She bounces a little on her seat.

Sable leans over, taps the address, and then slowly walks through the process of bookmarking it.

"It's important to keep in mind that while some individual sites may have fact-checking, like Wikipedia trying to keep on top of mistakes or vandalism, most of the internet has no fact-checking at all, so you need to check your sources. If anything gives you advice on how to do something on your computer, feel free to bother me about whether it's legitimate. If the advice is on something other than computers, I'm not guaranteed to be able to fact-check it right off the top of my head, but I can certainly help research, so feel free to bother me with that too."

Audrey nods quickly. "It does happen on the internet at home," she says. "Less than here probably but some. And of course there's organized crime, which always wants to get into your machine so they can lock you out and demand a ransom for your files. Going off the central Archive is always a bit of a risk." She bites her lip. "- if you haven't had that idea here yet," she says, "Which you might not, it going mainstream involves a clever method of making transactions over the internet so they're almost untraceable if the user does things right - then please forget I said that, it's something that I don't want to happen here."

"Well that sounds like quite the awful mess. No, we don't have that here yet, and I'm not going to spread the idea."

"Oh, good. That's good to hear. One bad thing from my world yours doesn't have." 

She goes to google and googles "art of sunflowers", finds Deviantart, picks out a wallpaper of an anime girl standing in a field of sunflowers, and sets it as her desktop background. Then she picks a new password (just in case) and sets it for her account. 

From there she goes back to wikipedia and searches for "handheld computer", then follows a redirect to the "smartphone" article. 

"Oh," she says softly. 'Your world really hasn't figured it out yet that the internet is the killer app, have you? Here it says that the primary feature of a smartphone is that you can use it to phone people or email them, but —" She shakes her head. "Your world really has no idea what's going to happen. It's staggering and total. Over the course of maybe a decade the internet goes from nowhere to omnipresent. At least, if you follow our progression of events, which..." She shrugs her shoulders. "I don't know if your world will be smart and organized enough to keep it - structured, like in my world. Wikipedia existing is a good sign, but..." She shakes her head. "Too much I don't know." 

Sable laughs ruefully and shakes her head. "When given the chance to be smart and organized, the safe bet is that Earth won't. What do you think would've happened if your world's internet revolution was run by the controlling, the entitled, and the short-sighted?"